4 December 2024 (Wednesday) - Big Cats

I went to the loo shortly after three o’clock and came back to find minimal (i.e. sod all) bedspace and all four of them snoring away. I tried to get back to sleep, but wresting space took some doing and it was rather noisy, so I got up and watched drivel on telly for an hour before trying the bed again.

I got a couple of hours kip.

 

I got up properly and opened the fourth window of my Advent Calendar… a skateboard. How does that fit in with the story so far? I made toast and whilst the voices in my head pondered skateboards I had my usual look at the Internet. It was still there. The stupid were very quick to show off their stupidity, and everyone else even quicker to laugh at them. Some half-wit had proven the spontaneous creation of matter… he’d stuck a seed into a plant pot filled with soil and a plant had grown. But there was still as much soil in the pot as there had been when he’d planted the seed. So where did the matter making up the plant come from? This fellow was serious!

 

I took the dogs up to the woods where we had a good four-mile walk. We met a few other walkers near the car park and all encounters passed off well, but once we were more than a quarter of a mile from the car park we didn’t see anyone else at all. We did see a deer skeleton though. And that made me wonder. That skeleton wasn’t there yesterday; we would have seen it as we walked past as it was rather obvious. So one of two things had happened. Either the deer had dropped dead after ten o’clock yesterday morning and had been stripped to bone in less than a day, or something had dragged the skeleton to where we found it..

I’m wondering… The bones looked a tad grim. It looked more than a day old. But what could have dragged it? Surely it would have been too heavy for a fox? It turns out that there have been big cat sightings reported in Kings Wood (admittedly a few years ago). I asked on the Big Cats in Kent Facebook page, and a few people commented that there *have* been sightings of big cats recently, but the leading light on there said that he didn’t work with the press any more. I can’t say I blame him; I suspect they’d just be taking the piss.

Mind you one chap did mention the Beast of Badlesmere.

 

We came home where the dogs had a dunk in the bath. Bailey had brown smears down her back (yuk!), and Morgan was a bit whiffy too.

With dogs scrubbed I went on a little shopping trip. First of all to Wickes where I got a waterproof electrical connector. And then on to Screwfix to get the screwdriver that Wickes didn’t have. I know that I can see B&Q from our back window, but over the years I’ve found that Wickes and Screwfix are friendly and helpful, and B&Q are utterly disinterested.

And then I popped into Tesco as I had orders from “er indoors ^TM” to get some milk. As I walked in I saw that they were doing bottles of Baileys at less than half price to ClubCard holders. And there were one or two other bargains to be had if you brandished your ClubCard. Cheese, biscuits, doughnuts, port… When I came to pay the bill was fifty-seven quid. But when I waved my ClubCard that dropped to forty quid. In the past I’ve been rather disparaging about Tesco ClubCard. But now I’m a believer.

And I’m convinced that I saw Brad Boimler in the queue for the checkout.

 

I came home where we scoffed some of the doughnuts for lunch, then I got busy in the garden. A couple of years ago the electrical cable from the kitchen to the garden water features melted on a particularly hot day, and then got chewed by rats. I repaired it at the time, but over the last couple of months the supposedly waterproof join has taken to falling apart in the rain. So today I took it all apart, ran the cable through a hose pipe to (hopefully) make it rat- and weather-proof and connected it all back up again. Ideally I’d not have a join and have one cable going all the way, but since we had the kitchen done we can’t easily (at all!) get a cable through the air brick and to the plug.

At the moment all is working. Here’s hoping it stays working.

As I fiddled about outside the voices in my head came up with today’s Advent story.

 

“er indoors ^TM” boiled up a very good curry which we washed down with a bottle of plonk whilst watching more “Junior Taskmaster”. And with dinner scoffed I cracked open the cheese and crackers I’d bought in Tesco earlier. The dogs like the crackers, and I have the cheese.

Blue Brie… not too shabby at all.